Golden Years

by Andrew M. Greeley

Chuck answered the questions in order.

  “It’s two o’clock in the morning, we’ve been around the country, so to speak, and we told you we’d be home late.” “Oh, yeah, now I remember. One of your mysterious projects … Uncle Vince said you should call him no matter how late you get in … Oh, gosh, I was so sleepy I forgot the bad news …”

  “Which is … ?” I asked.

  “Poor Aunt Jane is dead! I’m so sorry, so sorry!” she cuddled up in the couch next to me. We embraced one another and cried together.

  Chuck collapsed into his “official” chair and buried his face in his hands.

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know for sure. I think she may have killed herself … They’re all very angry.”

  “You went up there?”

  “My friend Ted Junior called this afternoon in tears. He wanted us to know. Aunt Peg and Rita and Father Ed and I drove up together. It was horrible. Chris and Madeleine—she’s the bitch he’s going to marry and, Chucky, they deserve each other—were all over poor Uncle Ted. Chris said like someone ought to sue him for malpractice on this case. She didn’t belong in that nuthouse. Jenny and Micky are screaming back at them and defending their father. They’re like she was out of her mind. Where else could Dad put her? Uncle Ted just sits there like a truck ran over him. He keeps asking what he did wrong. Father Ed tells him he didn’t do anything wrong. And he says he should never have brought her up to this neighborhood … I loved her so much, and Maddy says you had a hell of a way of showing it. Then they turn on poor Aunt Peg. It’s all her fault. She drove their mom out of the family when she brought that bitch into the house … That’s you, Mom.”

  “I imagine it is.”

  “It’s not true … Don’t pay any attention to them … She did try to kill me after all.”

  “We all must be forgiving, Mary Margaret,” Chuck says.

  “Father Ed finally calmed them all down. Gosh, he is truly a spectacular priest, isn’t he?”

  “Yes, he is,”I said.

  “Anyway before that happens Rita goes after Maddie and Chris. No one’s going to attack her mom when she’s around. She tells them they’re spoiled brats who were never nice to their own mother and they better shut up about Aunt Peg or she’ll scratch their eyes out … Poor Aunt Peg looks so sad. She remembers the good old days on Menard Avenue …”

  I couldn’t think straight. I never sensed that Jane resented me on Menard Avenue. She and Peg fought a little, but no more than other sisters their age. I never participated in the fights. I guess my problem was that I was there. I couldn’t believe she was dead.

  “What are the arrangements?” Chuck asked in a hushed voice.

  “Wake tomorrow night—private, which doesn’t mean anything at all. Every snob from the North Shore will be up there crowing over her.”

  “Mary Margaret,” I said sternly.

  “Sorry, Mom, but you know it’s true. There’s a ‘small’ funeral Wednesday morning. The girls want Father Ed to say it, he’s her brother after all. Nutty Chris goes ballistic. Father Delahaye was her confessor, her spiritual director. He took better care of her than Uncle Ted does. It’s settled that Father Ed will say the Mass, Father Delahaye will preach, and Chris will give the eulogy. He also makes it clear that he doesn’t want any family music, which he says is blasphemous. None of us are to sing either—that means you, Mom.”

  My daughter hugs me and breaks down.

  “It was one of the ugliest things I’ve ever seen, even worse than when poor Aunt Jane attacked Grams’s house.”

  “Does Grams know?” I asked.

  “Not yet; Aunt Peg is going to tell her in the morning. It’s going to be a real nuthouse up there. I don’t think she should go to the wake. Neither does Rita.”

  “It’s her firstborn child, hon, she’ll have to go.”

  “I guess you’re right … You guys better get some sleep. It will be two more days from hell.”

  “We have work to do, hon!”

  “You know what you’d say if I said that to you.”

  “Age has some privilege, Mary Margaret,” says her father. “We have the right to act like idiots. But thanks for worrying about us.”

  She hugs us both and goes upstairs.

  We go down to the darkroom and I remind Chucky to call Vince.

  “Yes, Mother,” he says with a giddy laugh.

  “Hi, Vince. All went well. They don’t know it yet but Joe and his wife and daughter are coming here for Thanksgiving … Yeah it was crazy, but we had to do it … I heard about it. Mary Margaret stayed up to tell us about the scene up there in Kenilworth in all its horrible details … Does Peg agree with me that Mother has to go to the wake and the funeral? Poor Jane was her firstborn … Yeah, both our daughters disagree … They think they know everything … Remind you of any twosome we might know?”

  “We were not that bossy, Charles Cronin O’Malley!”

  “Yes, you were.”

  We go into the darkroom to develop the negatives.

  “You did remember to take the lens caps off those things?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  We worked silently and efficiently, a veteran team that is very effective as long as I keep my big mouth shut.

  “We saved that marriage, didn’t we, Rosemarie my darling? Or to put it more precisely you did when you talked Ted into resisting Doctor’s pressure.”

  “That’s true. That was one of our first capers. I persuaded Ted that he should marry the woman he loved whether Doctor approved or not. I wonder what he thinks about me now.”

  “He did love her and still loves her. They had good years together.”

  “Yes, Chuck. He’ll always mourn her, not only what she was back when he came home from the war, but what she became when she moved up there … I shouldn’t blame it on the neighborhood. She might have gone the same way if she’d stayed here on the West Side … Who knows? … It’s over now anyway.”

  “She’s home with Dad,” he says, his voice choking.

  The three rolls of film had turned out fine.

  “You do the proof sheets. I’ll copy the tape. How many should I make?”

  “One to send to Abel Cain …”

  “Adam, Chucky Ducky.”

  “Right. One for our archive here. One to go into the vault where we’re going to put all this stuff in a couple of days. One for Vince. Four altogether. We keep the master tape. Don’t wreck it.”

  “Bastard.” I kiss him as I leave the darkroom.

  I was so tired I almost did ruin the master. I wrote “master—Brigid Winery” on its label and instead of putting it in the deck which would be copied, I put it in the deck to write on. Some kindly angel stopped me before it was too late. We needed only three. Chucky has counted the master and the archive twice when they were the same tape. Yet I made four. I tested each one of them to make sure we had not lost anything in the copying. Our audiovisual stuff is pretty good, too good to let my husband near it.

  I put each of the copies in envelopes and marked them—in my own flowing hand, as different from Chuck’s small, precise script as it could possibly be. “It’s good you’re so beautiful,” he said to me once. “Otherwise, I couldn’t stay married to you with that kind of handwriting.”

  “Yours is that of an anal-retentive male.”

  I knocked on the door.

  “Can I come in?”

  “You can always come, Rosemarie my darling.”

  “You never turned the red light on.”

  He ignored me and showed me six proof sheets, two for each of the films. Our system was that each of us would mark the best shots as we saw them, then compare our choices. The correlation, Chucky once said, showing off his knowledge of statistics, was in excess of point nine.

  I marked eight shots, the witch lady grabbing poor Sam, Jackson slapping Bride Mary, her spitting in his face, his expression of rage, little Sam running to her father, Jackson announcing who he was and what he wanted, the cro
wd of thugs closing around him, the hate on Jackson’s face as he warned Bride Mary and Joe that they would never be safe.

  “Let me see yours first,” Chucky ordered.

  “No way, you know the rules.”

  “You made the rule, I didn’t.”

  We had marked exactly the same shots.

  “Eight by ten, do you think?”

  “Right, and, Chucky darling, crop them so we get the horror of their facial expressions.”

  “Two copies?”

  “Maybe three would be better, Cain, our archives, and the vault. No four, one to send to the Rafterys.”

  “Okay. I’ll print them and you might prepare the packages and call the courier service. We want them to pick up these two packages at seven-thirty in the morning.”

  The couriers had a twenty-four-hour service. Expensive, Chucky had argued once. It’s a tax deduction, I told him.

  I made another tape and put it in an envelope, which I labeled.

  Then I called the courier phone and told the sleepy Hispanic woman who answered that I needed a pickup at seven-thirty. Documents and photographs. Yes, someone would be at the door. Which meant me.

  I addressed the courier envelopes, slipped the envelopes with the tape into each of them, and put them on the table right next to each of the courier packs, a firm envelope for the photos.

  Chuck yelled from the darkroom.

  “Come on in.”

  “I want your judgment on my cropping, boss lady. This is the first set.”

  “You seemed to have done them well enough,”I said. After a quick glance. “Not perfect but your work is never quite perfect.”

  I needled him often on this subject, because he thinks everything he does has to be perfect.

  “Go with them?”

  “Certainly … Chucky, these pictures are frightening.”

  “It was a terrifying scene. I was afraid when Jackson hit Bride Mary that he wanted bloodshed. Then I would have to emerge on the front door with the pair of sawed-off shotguns Joe had left downstairs. I think we could have knocked off all four almost at once.”

  “Enough of this Rambo talk, Charles Cronin O’Malley … There weren’t really shotguns downstairs, were there?”

  “There were indeed. We would have had surprise on our side. I learned in the military that he who shoots first usually wins. They wouldn’t have a chance to draw their guns.”

  I shivered.

  “You never fired a gun at anyone when you were in the service.”

  “It doesn’t take much training to hit someone in the belly with a shotgun.”

  He wasn’t kidding. I was glad he wasn’t kidding. They had to be ready.

  “What if the people in the car emerged shooting after you had wiped out their leaders?”

  “They probably would get the hell out of there as soon as they could. We each had a charge left in our gun. We could have reloaded.”

  “Nightmare material.”

  “I’m glad it never came to that. We would have had a lot of explaining to the local sheriff. Here’s the first set, Rosemarie. Put them in the courier packs and put the packs at the front door. I’ll go down when the bell rings.”

  “You will not! I have to get up at seven anyway to feed the kids breakfast.”

  “They can get their own breakfast.”

  “Sure they can, but I’m their mother … You need your sleep. I’ll crawl back in after the kids leave for school.”

  He didn’t argue. I have a much greater store of energy than my husband does. I can go much longer than he can before I drop. Eventually, however, I drop too.

  “Hey,” he said, just remembering something. “Here’s the torn check.”

  He reached into his pocket and produced a check which was not only torn but crumpled, a bad show from a neatness freak.

  “I’ll put it in the pack for I Street,” I said. It was too late to score points about his not being all that neat.

  I checked and rechecked the courier packs—tape, photos ready to go to the District and to the St. Brigid’s Winery. I sealed that courier pack.

  Chucky came out of the darkroom with a second set of pictures.

  “Put them at the door and then go to bed, Rosemarie my darling.”

  We kissed each other gently.

  “You can do the other two sets in the morning.”

  “Three, one for Vince too. And no, I want to get this project cleared away before we have to face the North Shore crowd.”

  “Oh, dear God, poor Jane.”

  “She’s free now, Rosemarie. Life would not have become any better for her.”

  I carried the two packs to the doorway. Not much weight to either of them, but perhaps the difference between life and death for the Raftery family.

  I staggered up to the master bedroom and jumped back into bed. The alarm rang at 7:00. Where’s my Chucky?

  He was sitting at the worktable, sound asleep. I roused him and sent him up to bed. Worn-out little boy, he did what he was told. At 7:30 the rest of the family appeared, just as I sent the courier away with the packages and fifty dollars for himself.

  “Where’s Daddy?” Shovie demanded.

  “Upstairs. He fell asleep in the darkroom.”

  Peg called around ten.

  “How you guys doing?”

  “Chuck fell asleep in the darkroom, so he’s up in bed finally. I had to get the kids off to school. Physically I’m okay.”

  “Ed and I visited April this morning. She didn’t seem surprised. Poor Jane was going to do something like that, she said. Now at least she’ll have some peace. She wouldn’t consider staying home. April Rosemary and Jamie will bring her up there. He’s a good doctor even if he’s a shrink.”

  We agreed that we would meet in the parking lot of the funeral home and go in en masse. Peg and I would stand on either side of Mom at the far end of the receiving line.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Chuck

  A buzz on the phone. Someone wanted me. I picked up the phone.

  “Chuck, I just got your materials, for which many thanks.”

  “That was fast.”

  “It’s two in the afternoon … It’s all I need to roll up that whole operation and get rid of some people whom we should have tossed out long ago. Many thanks.”

  “We’re putting copies away in several unbreakable vaults.”

  “I take that for granted … It was good of the Rafterys, if I may call them that, to reject our check. It will make my case stronger, though it is strong enough.”

  “I’m delighted to hear that.”

  “It was an ugly and dangerous few moments. What would have happened if Jackson lost his mind completely?”

  “I would have walked out with Joe’s two loaded sawed-off shotguns and we would have terminated your cowboys.”

  “That would have been very dangerous.”

  “The four of them would be dead before they could draw their guns.”

  “Well, no one has ever questioned either your bravery or your intelligence. I’ll look forward to seeing you the next time you’re in the District.”

  Big deal warrior, striding out into the OK Corral to wipe out the Clantons. I probably would have frozen and sat down and cried my eyes out.

  My wife bustled into the room. She was wearing her swimsuit and a terry-cloth robe.

  “I have a big dish of spaghetti Bolognese down by poolside. Want to join me? You need a good swim to get the kinks out before we drive up to Kenilworth.”

  “I assume you listened to Cain?”

  “I did. He is clearly one of the good guys.”

  “To the extent that is possible in the spook world.”

  So we went down to the pool and swam and ate pasta and, under an emerging sun, felt a little better.

  The plan at the funeral home was that we would walk in as a body. Rosemarie and I would lead because we are, Mary Margaret told us, “intimidation resistant.” Vince and Peg would follow with Mom. Then the rest o
f the clan, all very solemn and proper. We would find a chair for Mom on the far side of the casket from the McCormacks. Peg and Rosie would stand behind the chair. Father Ed would hover around them. Jamie and April Rosemary Nettleton would sit in the front row of chairs in case Mom needed some medical care. We would depart after an hour or so.

  There was no special assignment either for me or my intermediate daughter. We had decided, however, that we would sit right behind Jamie and April Rosemary just in case there was need for dramatic intervention. I doubted that there would be. This was Faith, Hope, and Cadillac parish. The nastiness, such as it might be, would be verbal and indirect.

  “Would you rather have me or Mom as your resistance colleague?” Mary Margaret had asked.

  “Well, you’re better at black belt than she is, but she’s meaner than you are.”

  My wife demonstrated this skill when we entered the mostly empty funeral parlor. A tall, blond frenetic woman descended upon us, a Valkyrie without the music.

  “It has been decided,” she told us loudly, “that you may pay your respects, but you may not stand by the casket.”

  “Maddy,” Rosemarie said calmly, “why don’t you crawl back into the nest of the she-coyote that whelped you?”

  Poor Maddy recoiled against the wall like she had been slapped.

  I tried to choke back my laugh. Don’t fool around with a New Yorker writer.

  Chris disappeared before we arrived at the line of mourners. Between the rest of them and us there was only sympathy and love. Jenny and Micky had grown up, perhaps overnight, into mature and poised young women. Ted Junior smiled sadly at us. His distraught father repeated the words, “I loved her, I still love her, I’ll always love her.”

  “What did I do wrong, Chuck?” he pleaded with me.

  “Another psychiatrist would tell you that you did nothing wrong.”

  “That’s too easy … Still, I hope that’s how God sees it.”

  Mom knelt at the casket, Peg and Rosemarie on either side. This bloated, ugly corpse had once been the beautiful, bouncy baby daughter she and her husband had brought home from the hospital before the Great Depression. Jane, bright, cheerful, enthusiastic, had been the center of their lives and love.

  Then an unattractive boy child with kinky red hair arrived on the scene, an enigmatic little punk. No threat to his big sister, who could simply ignore him. But then, in 1931 at the depth of the Great Depression, Margaret Mary, forever “Peg,” appeared—radiant, gorgeous, irresistible. Jane had to learn then at five years old that a love which is shared is not diminished. Apparently she never learned it. It had not seemed so in our impoverished but happy lives on Menard Avenue. Perhaps it only became so when she moved away from the neighborhood and an errant gene had kicked off a manic-depressive syndrome.